The Incredibly Heartwarming Story Behind the Batkid Movie

Director Dana Nachman tells us how the documentary came together, and it'll make you believe in the positive power of social media.

If you were using social media on November 15, 2013, you no doubt heard about Batkid, aka leukemia-stricken five-year-old Miles Scott, who got to live out his dream of being the Caped Crusader courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation (his cancer is currently in remission). Led by Patricia Wilson, the Foundation transformed San Francisco into Gotham City for an entire day so that Miles might battle the Riddler and the Penguin alongside Batman (played by acrobat/inventor EJ Johnston). The story quickly went around the Internet, compelling thousands to travel to the Bay Area to lend their support, and it's now also a movie: Batkid Begins (out today in select cities and expanding nationwide on July 10), a moving portrait of people selflessly coming together for a good cause. Earlier this week, we spoke to the documentary's director, Dana Nachman, about Miles' reaction to his cinematic debut, the unifying potential of social media, and why this is not just another superhero movie.

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How did you get involved with the Batkid phenomenon? I read that you didn't even follow along with it in real-time.

Isn't that the most embarrassing thing? Especially because close to two billion people did. But I was editing. I was in the middle of a project, and I guess I wasn't on social media that week, or watching the news—and it was in the news a lot here in San Francisco. So I was in a little bit of an editing cave. But about a week later, I was talking to a friend of mine who I used to job-share with at NBC, and she said she was trying to get an interview with the Batkid, but they weren't doing any interviews. And I said, "Oh, that would have made such a great documentary," at which point she said she was going to call them to see if they'd meet with us about a documentary. A few minutes later, she called back and said we had a meeting for the next day at 9 a.m. And I was like, "Really?" I thought maybe we should have it be a crowdsourced documentary, which would be interesting, because it was such a crowdsourced event. But at the end of the meeting, I asked, "You didn't happen to shoot it, did you?" They told me that they'd actually had a guy there with five cameras, in order to make a fundraising video. And I just thought, "Oh, greeaaat."

The film had a fast production turnaround, right?

Yes. When I went into the first meeting, they let me know that three or four people had approached them about doing a documentary, and that got my competitive hackles up. At the end of our talk, they said they really wanted something to show at the one-year anniversary. And this is about the third week of December 2014, so the one-year anniversary would have been the following November 15. I was like, "Oh yeah, sure, that's no problem!" Which was funny, because I'd never made a film in less than three to four years [laughs]. But I would have done whatever it took, and that's what we did—we had a cut for November 15.

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Was the production made easier, or more difficult, by the wealth of filmed footage, and media content, that already existed? I imagine a virtual dump truck full of video and print materials backing up to your door...

Yes, between what we shot and what we got, our final hard drive had about six terabytes of stuff on it. It was day-and-night work, and everything else that I was doing got pushed to the side. But with that said, it was actually pretty easy, because I wrote a treatment in order to get funding in January—before they had even given me a definitive yes, but I had to get it going because there was a deadline—and the story stayed very true to how I wrote that initial treatment.

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How much time did you get to spend with Miles and his family?

They live in a very remote area [Tulelake, California, near the Oregon border], so now I've been there two times. But we shot with him twice, once here in San Francisco, once in his hometown. Since then, I've just been up there to visit, because they're really fun to be around. But we didn't have to shoot with them too much, probably a total of five days.

"Miles still says he saved Gotham City."

Has Miles seen the documentary?

Yes [laughs]. I was nervous about him seeing it, because it gets very granular about how the wish was made. Whereas he showed up and became Batman. I talked to his mom about it, and said I'd defer to her if she didn't want to show it to him, but she wanted him to see it. And he loved it. His whole thing was, the next day he wanted to watch it again, and then the next day, again. He really, really liked it. And my kids watch it a lot. I think it's just the kind of thing that, because there's so much in it, you can kind of watch it over and over and see new things, especially for a kid. I think it's the beauty of children that, often, they know something's not quite real, but it's part of their fantasy life to have it be real. So Miles still says he saved Gotham City, and that Gotham City is Patricia (Wilson) and that EJ (Johnston) is the real Batman. He's hung out with EJ, but that's in his Bruce Wayne outfit. So it's just that lovely thing about children, where real and not real kind of blur.

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One of the points raised at the end of the film is that it's not clear if Miles grasped the enormity of what had taken place. Did you get a sense about that from him?

I don't think he could. I think for kids, they have no perspective. Miles wouldn't know the difference between 200 and 25,000 people, and he certainly knows nothing about online. And then when it came to the crowds, because he's this country boy, he didn't really know if people just did this sort of thing all the time. He has no perspective of what a city's like. I think the point of it all is that he shouldn't have grasped it. But the hope is that when he's older, he'll be able to see how amazing this was, that the community came out for him.

It'll no doubt be a strange thing to look back years from now, and see that this all took place for him.

I can only think that it'll be a blip on the radar when he's older. Ten years from now, when he's seventeen—that's a long time for now. When you think about how things, even monumental things in history, change after ten years... I don't remember all that much from when I was five!

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In one respect, the Batkid story seems to be about social media, and about its potential to both disseminate information, and to bring people together.

When I first started making the film, what really intrigued me, especially living in the middle of Silicon Valley, was how the story went viral. And moreover, about how everybody here wants things to go viral, but this was a great example of how people didn't want this to go viral, but it did, and why it did. But now coming to the end of it, I feel the story is really about a community coming together. I think it's a story about what happens when a group of people give something their all for no gain of their own. That's my special takeaway from the day depicted in the film. Normally I don't sit through my movies with an audience, and this one I think I've watched more than 35 times now. And every time, it kind of chokes me up. My favorite line is when EJ breaks his projector, and he says that Miles would have never known the difference, but his whole life, he'll have known he could have made it better. That gives me chills every time I hear him say that, because I think that's so lacking in the world—not because we're bad people, but because we don't have time. We have to put our effort into our kids, or our parents, or whatever. So to do that for a stranger, and to have this feeling of community and working for one another, that's what I take away from the film now.

EJ Johnston, Batman, and Miles Scott, Batkid.

Paul Sakuma/Warner Bros.

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How closely were New Line and its parent company Warner Bros., which distributes the Batman movies, involved in the making of the film? There must have been copyright issues at play, and Warner is now distributing the documentary.

We were definitely dotting our "I"s and crossing our "T"s, legally. We were very careful to only go by documentary laws, that we were documenting an event that had happened. So for instance, when the Batman symbol was on the "Batmobile" Lamborghinis, we can shoot that, but we couldn't draw our own cartoon of that. We were very aware of such trademark and fair-usage issues. My producer said, "Warner Bros. is going to buy this movie." And I kept responding with, "They don't buy documentaries, don't get your hopes up." That was not on my radar. I thought we'd be in the clear to go somewhere else. Then at Slamdance in January, where we premiered the film, three executives from New Line came and watched it, and they cried and laughed in the audience, and after that they started talking to our agents, and that's how it happened.

Were you wary of the fact that, if not handled properly, a film like this could turn into an ad for Make-A-Wish or Warner Bros. or DC Comics, or Batman himself?

Oh yeah, that's always my biggest thought, in anything I do, not just this film. I'm starting another film with another organization, and you have to tell people early on: I think this is a good opportunity for you, but this is not a commercial, this is a documentation of what happened. Whenever there was a Make-A-Wish sign, or even a reference to Make-A-Wish, I would try to limit how many times it was said, because I didn't want anybody to think it was a commercial for Make-A-Wish. And you know what? There are going to be some people who think it is. That's just what's going to happen. But I'm always thinking about that. In terms of Warner Bros., however, I didn't think about it at all. It's funny because it's now being released by Warner Bros., but at the time, I wasn't worried about it being a Batman commercial, because I wasn't even thinking about them in that way. But I do think it's a lovely love letter to Batman, too.

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